Innovation Anthology #503:
It was 1976 when Richard Masalanko graduated from NAIT as a chemical technologist and joined the research department of a new oil sands company called Syncrude.
One of Richard’s first tasks with Syncrude was to gather samples from the waterways before the company started its operations.
RICHARD MASALANKO: And essentially what we were trying to do is what was there before the plant started up. What’s the baseline of the various components, the constituents of the water? And then when the plant started up, of course, afterwards we can check again and see, what are the changes. And so we’ve gone through many changes in 36 years, as you can well imagine. So I learned a lot of things in the early days. In the winter we had to sample waterways as well. They were establishing what was happening during the various seasons. I can remember distinctly a time on the Athabasca River taking a sample near the MacKay area. And we had to go onto the river and we had to use an ice auger to get into this river. And I thought this won’t take long. Well it did take a long time. That ice to my surprise was like three or more feet thick. I’d never heard of a river having that kind of a thickness of ice.
Richard Masalanko’s team also set up weather stations to establish trends for the environmental baseline.
Thanks today to SYNCRUDE
FOR INNOVATION ANTHOLOGY
I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
Guest
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Sponsor
Syncrude
Program Date: 2012-10-09